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Every industrial plant operator in the world has a few universal pain points: how can we reduce downtime, costs, and safety risks while raising productivity? All of those add up when plants have to contract multiple teams for their inspection, monitoring, engineering, and maintenance needs, especially for at-height assets. When it comes to keeping your assets protected and in-service, sometimes less is more.
That’s where MISTRAS Group, Inc. steps in.
MISTRAS is a one-source provider of asset protection solutions, spanning products and services for inspection, engineering, maintenance, monitoring, and data management software. It is also an industry leader in rope access inspection and mechanical services. From detection to repair, companies only need a single solution provider, cutting costs, downtime, and workplace congestion while taking meaningful steps to increase safety.
“Our customers want to reduce their simultaneous operation (SIMOPS) conflicts,” said Marlin Lester, Manager of MISTRAS’ Mechanical Services Center of Excellence (COE). “In SIMOPS, you want as few people as possible in the operating area. Since our personnel are certified in multiple trades, we can perform all the work they need with only a small and efficient crew.”
The company’s solutions include corrosion mitigation, pipefitting, electrical, industrial, and insulation services. MISTRAS—along with its member-company, NACHER, a leading offshore mechanical service provider in the Gulf of Mexico region—are experts in coating applications, industrial cleaning, flange management, and surface preparation, including a few proprietary technologies for added layers of corrosion mitigation.
Utilizing rope access technicians, the company’s mechanical teams operate even on the most hard-to-reach and confined assets -- areas that often present difficulties for equipment repair and inspection teams at refineries and other industrial plants. In these situations, scaffolding isn’t always the most effective option, due to difficulties in constructing it and the creation of additional safety risks. MISTRAS’ rope access teams are a safe and cost-effective alternative.
“Our rope access teams have a wide repertoire because most mechanical trades can be performed on ropes,” said Carolyn Swan, Global Manager of MISTRAS’ Rope Access COE. “Insulation, coating, and welding are all routine rope-deployable service lines in a petrochemical environment, where we work on anything from cokers to tanks, spheres, stacks, and more. We reduce our customers’ number of at-risk hours because rope access is much quicker and safer than all the man-hours involved in scaffolding.”
Take the case of a set of at-height piping with corrosion under insulation, which can be hard to detect, difficult to mitigate, and costly to repair. Using disparate service providers, plants would have to hire individual contractors to strip the insulation, conduct the inspection, perform corrosion mitigation and surface preparation services, and re-insulate the piping. Assuming one or more of these vendors can’t perform the services on ropes, using scaffolding increases the on-site equipment and personnel footprint for the duration of the project.
Instead, MISTRAS completes all of these services with a small, multi-disciplined team. The company can also use drones for safe preliminary visuals on potential areas of concern; remote monitoring solutions to keep you updated on your assets condition in between inspections; and Plant Condition Management Software (PCMS®), an industry-leading mechanical integrity data management software, to centralize all asset protection data.
Said Lester: “MISTRAS has industry experts in every field who understand best practices and the value of the services they’re providing. In terms of resources, safety, and, productivity, it just makes sense for our clients.”
How much sense? During a 28-day turnaround, MISTRAS saved a major refinery over $2 million by utilizing rope access for mechanical services, in addition to an 81% reduction in at-risk work hours. Your assets may be high, but the value MISTRAS’ one-source approach brings your plant is higher.
For more information, visit www.mistrasgroup.com or call 1-609-716-4000. To hear industry experts discuss this topic in depth, please register for an upcoming webinar, October 25th at 1 pm. Register here.